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A while ago, Giovanni Venturi interviewed Marco Martin for the Italian KDE website (so if you read Italian, please see there for the authentic version). For our Italian-challenged readers, we are pleased to present an English translation below. Marco "Notmart" Martin is of course well known as one of the primary developers of the new Plasma Netbook workspace and for his habit of teasing us via his blog with news of new features for the X+1 release of our Software Compilation just before version X is released...

Bruno Knaapen is gone. He died yesterday. By choice, and with dignity, Bruno bid his earthly family farewell and slipped beyond The Veil. Bruno Knaapen was ravaged by brain cancer. That cancer had spread throughout his body.

With the news coming out that the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has agreed to investigate both RIM and Apple over patent claims brought by Kodak, it makes you wonder if we'll soon be able to have any smartphones at all. As you hopefully know the ITC process is a sneaky loophole used by patent holders to get two totally unrelated shots at putting the same company on trial for infringing on the same patents.

The FERC, the agency with oversight of the U.S. power grid, signed an order on Thursday that grants Google Energy market-based rate authorization. This paves the way for the search giant to not only better manage its own energy costs, but to possibly add electricity marketer to its repertoire of services.

[Google Calendar, Docs and now Energy? - Scott]

LXer Feature: 20-Feb-2010

My review of the first day of SCALE 8x and the WIOS talks I attended.

Continuing their impressive record of quick delivery of fresh KDE software, the KDE Windows team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of packages with the latest KDE release for the Windows platform. The installer provides not only most of the applications from Software Compilation 4.4, but also the latest versions of a number of independently released KDE applications. Highlights include the latest stable version of digiKam (and the KIPI plugins) and Konversation. Although Amarok is not yet included in the installer there is progress being made.

Not to be left out of the bit “ME” craze, the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release will include the “MeMenu.” The MeMenu will be your one-stop spot for sending out all your social media broadcasts right from within Ubuntu.

In a recent interview (as of yesterday, 19 February) for DellVlog, Mark Shuttleworth says Ubuntu will finally change the default theme from Human to a "light theme". Here is the entire interview:

Late yesterday, Pawe? Jakub Dawidek committed HAST to HEAD, marking the completion of this Foundation sponsored project. We asked Pawel to write a few words about the project. He says: HAST is ready!

The Wine development release 1.1.39 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

One of the key responsibilities of a system administrator is to ensure the safety of an organisation's computer data. This is a critical task for any organisation, given that the loss of important data could have profound implications on its future prosperity.

Microsoft is determined to be a leader of the open source movement. It will once again be a “platinum sponsor” at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco next month and its National Technology Officer for the U.S., Stuart McKee, will deliver a keynote. McKee, former CIO for Washington state, may be best known to open source advocates for admitting that “ODF won” the standards battle with Microsoft’s Open Office XML back in 2008.

[I can answer that question for you Dana..and the answer is; No - Scott]

Opera has freed its first open source project, moving code for its Dragonfly debug tool onto the popular BitBucket hosting service. Dragonfly - a website debug tool similar to Mozilla's Firebug - was always intended as an open source project. From its inception in 2008, it carried an open source BSD license. But until this month, the code repository sat on Opera servers. As of February 10, it's a fully open source project hosted on BitBucket.

Canonical is developing a 2D ARM interface based on Enlightenment Foundation Libraries for the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx") version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. In other Ubuntu news, Ubuntu Live CDs in Lucid Lynx will boot 33 percent faster, and The Linux Box will market Ubuntu.

SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo, kicks off today in Los Angeles. More than a Linux geek fest, there are signs that SCALE is starting to attract partners that work with Red Hat, Novell, Canonical and other open source specialists. Here’s a look at five key business trends emerging at SCALE.

At 9;00 AM EST today, the parties to Jacobsen v. Katz filed a settlement agreement with the U.S. Federal District Court for the Northern District of California. In doing so, they brought an end to one of the most important legal cases to date affecting the continued success of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The terms of the settlement mark a complete victory for Jacobsen.

It's no secret that Linux runs behind many consumer devices, and embedded Linux fits in the tiniest of places. One of the latest ways to get your Linux fix comes in what looks like power wall wart from TonidoPlug. Under the cover you'll find essentially a Marvell SheevaPlug with a 1.2 GHz CPU, 512MB of DDR2 memory and a 512MB flash disk. On the outside you'll see a single USB port and an Ethernet jack.

Burg is a brand-new boot loader based on GRUB. It uses a new object format which allows it to be built in a wider range of OS. It also has a highly configurable menu system which works in both text and graphic mode. We did show you in a previous post how to install and configure burg in Ubuntu. Today we will see how to enable password protection in burg.

The annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) is always a highlight of the year for the mobile sector but this year's show was also a big one for open source software. Traditionally in a market dominated by proprietary operating systems there has been a significant shift towards open source software by mobile phone makers over the past year.

Last month we published benchmarks of EXT4 comparing this file-system's performance when it was first marked stable in the mainline kernel and then where it is at now in the Linux kernel while testing every major release in between. This article was followed up by a Btrfs versus EXT4 comparison using the Linux 2.6.33 kernel to see how the two most talked about Linux file-systems are battling it out with the latest kernel. After those Linux file-system benchmarks were published, we received a request from Canonical to look at the EXT3 performance too. With that said, we have done just that and have published EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs benchmarks from Ubuntu 9.10 and a Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshot from an Intel Atom netbook.